The Eyrie was unusually quiet that evening.
Beyond my west window, the Margalla Hills were slowly disappearing into dusk. Foxy, my mustard-coloured Volkswagen, rested below like an old companion waiting for another journey. A cup of hot tea steamed beside me, but I had forgotten the tea.
My eyes were fixed on the television.
Russia.
Election results.
Numbers were marching across the screen — percentages, seats, parties, victory statements. The ballot box had spoken, at least officially.
Then came the question that sometimes refuses to leave a journalist alone:
When the ballot box speaks, who is listening — and who may already have written the script?
Chin-chin-chin-chin…
I turned.
The sound had come from behind me.
BāBā-Tāl [the Bell-man] was standing in the doorway, tall and thin, wearing his navy-blue robe stitched with little brass bells. His deep eyes went directly to the television screen.
He did not ask what I was watching.
He already knew.
He walked to his chair, sat down, and watched the Russian numbers for several moments.
Then he looked at me.
“Bacha!”
I knew that tone.
Whenever BāBā-Tāl says “Bacha!” like that, an ordinary evening is about to become a journey through history.
“Tell me,” he said softly, “does a ballot box always tell the whole story?”
I looked again at the screen.
The numbers were clear.
But suddenly, the question was not.
Russia has just held its 2026 State Duma election. According to near-complete official results, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia won 57.83 percent of the party-list vote and secured 355 of the Duma’s 450 seats. Turnout was reported at about 59 percent.
There is no need to manufacture mystery around those numbers. They are the announced results.
But neither should a journalist confuse an announced result with the whole political environment surrounding it.
The election took place under conditions in which major independent or anti-war political voices faced serious restrictions. The liberal Yabloko party was excluded from the federal contest, while Russia did not permit an OSCE election-observation mission for the vote. Reports from the Associated Press also described restrictions affecting observers and opposition activity.
So how “crystal clear” was the election?
I would not put a percentage on it.
An election can have precise arithmetic and still leave questions about the political conditions under which that arithmetic was produced.
That distinction matters.
And perhaps that is why BāBā-Tāl was smiling.
I have seen another kind of election.
It was 1984.
I was sitting in my apartment in Jackson Heights, New York, watching the American presidential election results unfold on television.
Ronald Reagan was seeking re-election against Walter Mondale. Mondale’s running mate was Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman nominated for vice president by a major American political party.
The results came in like a political avalanche.
Reagan won 49 states. Mondale carried only his home state of Minnesota, while Reagan and George H. W. Bush received 525 electoral votes to Mondale and Ferraro’s 13.
Coming from Pakistan, I half expected political thunder.
Instead, I watched something that impressed me deeply.
Mondale called Reagan, congratulated him and accepted the verdict. In his concession speech, he told Americans that Reagan was their president and said that the people’s choice had been made peacefully.
I remember sitting there thinking:
So this is how a political defeat can look.
No burning country.
No tearing apart of the national fabric.
No ballot box becoming a battlefield.
Just a winner and a loser — and one country.
BāBā-Tāl’s bells chimed softly.
“Bacha,” he said, “now go home.”
And home, for me, was Pakistan.
My mind travelled backward to 1970.
Pakistan’s first general election under universal adult franchise produced a result that was mathematically unmistakable: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won an absolute majority in the National Assembly, while Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party emerged as the dominant force in West Pakistan. The two major parties won no National Assembly seat in the other wing.
Then came the political impasse.
The National Assembly was postponed. Bhutto declared that his party would not attend the session unless the constitutional issue was resolved to his satisfaction, while Mujib maintained his mandate and constitutional programme. The confrontation deepened.
And here I cannot hide behind the safe language of an academic footnote.
I am writing as a man who lived through that history.
I am one hundred percent convinced that Bhutto was among the four principal political actors whose actions helped tear my homeland apart.
That is my considered judgment, formed over a lifetime of watching, reading, remembering and suffering.
I know those are strong words.
I choose them deliberately.
For me, the words associated with that period — “Udhar tum, idhar hum” — became more than a political slogan. They became a line drawn across a country.
There is, however, an important historical caution here. The phrase is widely attributed to Bhutto, but contemporary and later accounts dispute the exact wording and attribution; Dawn has reported that the famous headline was created by journalist Abbas Athar and that Bhutto’s own recorded position was more complicated.
That disagreement does not erase the political meaning the phrase acquired in public memory.
For me, it became a symbol.
And I have spent a lifetime chasing that line.
In January 1971, sitting in Shikarpur, I wrote four lines:
چند اک بڑوں کی ضد رہی
اور جنگ میں چھوٹے مرے
سونی ہوئی ماؤں کی گود
بہنوں کے دوپٹے گرے
جب خون کافی بہہ گیا
تب ان میں سمجھوتہ ہوا
یہ ملک میرا ہوگیا
وہ دیش تمہارا ہوا
A few stubborn men insisted,
the small ones died in war.
Mother’s laps become empty;
Sisters’ veils fell’
When enough blood had flowed,
the powerful reached anagreemt.
” this country is mine;
that desh belongs to you.
I did not know then what history would make of those words.
Today, they sound almost prophetic to me.
I do not claim supernatural foresight. Perhaps I was simply a young man looking hard enough at the darkness around him.
Yet Ghalib once wrote:
“aate haiñ ġhaib se ye mazāmīñ ḳhayāl meñ”
“آتے ہیں غیب سے یہ مضامیں خیال میں”
Some thoughts arrive in the mind from places we cannot explain.
My poem was not history.
It was a warning written before the history had finished unfolding.
And this is where Russia enters my story.
The temptation is to look at a powerful country, see a dominant president, a dominant party, a parliament overwhelmingly controlled by that party, restrictions on opposition, a continuing war — and then declare the entire picture black or white.
I refuse to do that.
The Russian people are not one mind.
A recent Levada Center survey found that 68 percent of respondents said they supported the actions of Russian armed forces in Ukraine, while 21 percent said they did not. At the same time, 59 percent said they favoured moving toward peace negotiations, while 31 percent favoured continuing military action.
Those figures alone should teach us something.
Support for a government’s military policy does not automatically mean that every citizen desires the death of civilians, the destruction of cities or the disappearance of another nation.
A people cannot be reduced to one television channel, one polling number, one election result or one ruler.
Nor can the actions of a state be automatically transferred to every individual living under that state.
That is why the ballot box matters.
And that is why the conditions around the ballot box matter too.
The Qur’an gives us a standard far older than modern electoral politics:
“Indeed, Allah commands you to render trusts to whom they are due and when you judge between people to judge with justice.”
— Holy Qur’an, Surah An-Nisa 4:58.
A public office is a trust.
A vote is a trust.
A mandate is a trust.
And power — perhaps above all — is a trust.
Holy Prophet Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him] said:
“When honesty is lost, then wait for the Hour.”
When asked how honesty would be lost, he replied:
“When authority is given to those who do not deserve it, then wait for the Hour.”
— Sahih al-Bukhari 6496, Book 81, Hadith 85.
BāBā-Tāl leaned toward the television.
“Bacha,” he whispered, “the dangerous thing is not only the hand that casts the vote. Look also at the hands that shape the choices.”
Chin-chin…
There they were again.
The hands behind the curtain.
I do not pretend to know every hand.
That is precisely the point.
History is rarely as simple as the official photograph.
Sometimes there are visible actors.
Sometimes there are institutions.
Sometimes there are political calculations.
Sometimes there are hidden interests.
And sometimes the public itself becomes part of the machinery through fear, hope, nationalism, economic pressure, propaganda or genuine conviction.
The journalist’s duty is not to invent the invisible hand.
It is to keep asking whether one exists, what evidence supports the question, and where evidence ends and speculation begins.
Shakespeare put the burden of power in another memorable line:
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
A crown may shine.
A presidential palace may shine.
A parliament may shine.
A ballot box may shine.
But the test of political power is what happens when the powerful are asked to listen to those who disagree with them.
That is where democracy becomes more than arithmetic.
That is where an election becomes more than an event.
That is where a country discovers whether its institutions are stronger than its personalities.
Russia today offers a difficult case study.
Its official election result is clear.
Its political environment is contested.
Its opposition space is restricted.
Its society contains both support for the war and a substantial desire for negotiations.
And its president remains the central figure in Russian politics after decades at the top of the state.
These are facts and documented measurements.
What they ultimately mean for Russia’s future is a question history will answer more reliably than any columnist can.
But Pakistan taught me another lesson.
When political leaders begin treating a national mandate as a private possession, when opponents begin seeing each other as enemies rather than competitors, and when institutions become instruments of political confrontation, the ballot box can cease to be a bridge.
It can become a fault line.
And once a fault line becomes a battlefield, ordinary people pay the bill.
The mothers.
The sisters.
The young men.
The villages.
The cities.
The graves.
My 1971 poem keeps returning to me:
چند اک بڑوں کی ضد رہی
اور جنگ میں چھوٹے مرے
A few powerful men remained stubborn;
and the small ones died in the war.
That is perhaps the oldest political tragedy on earth.
The powerful argue.
The ordinary people bury their dead.
So I return to the television screen.
Russia.
The numbers are still moving.
BāBā-Tāl has gone quiet.
Foxy waits below.
The tea has gone cold.
And somewhere between Moscow and Islamabad, between 1984 and 1970, between the ballot box and the battlefield, I hear the faintest sound of brass bells.
Chin-chin-chin-chin…
Perhaps BāBā-Tāl is asking only one question:
When the next ballot is cast, will we remember that a nation is bigger than the winner of an election?
I close my notebook.
The answer must belong to the people.
But history has already written its warning.
When the ballot box closes, the counting may end.
But the real counting — of trust, justice, consequences and human lives — never does.